a blog on being a baba, parenting, and politics

Posts tagged “sustaining movements”

As I’m entering my 40s, I’ve learned a lot about trauma and triggers in life and the movement. From being painfully unaware to being too aware of my own emotions. In my better moments, I’ve had capacity for emotional intelligence. Still, I struggle with holding this tension and feel that sometimes emotional awareness gets conflated with emotional intelligence. In the 21st Century, this dialectic and nuance is even more important to understand.

I’ve been thinking about all the people in my life who invested in me from my youth and college years to the current yelder years. Like many, I was pretty awkward and confused (pictured above). I grew up in an immigrant family in San Francisco then moved to Fremont, a pretty middle class suburb in the Bay Area, where I encountered the KKK and other racists growing up. (A story for another day and complicated, to say the least.) If I were to combine the cost of the investment in me – the mental, emotional, and other kinds of labor – it would be priceless. Yet, there is an actual financial cost to all of this.

I’m grateful for all the people who believed in me and saw my future self. I was fortunate to get involved in many youth leadership programs in the Bay Area. To me, nurturing the next generation is not just a good or nice thing to do; it is a political project that is integral to our future. Some of these reflections also come from last week as Seeding Change announced our new leadership and the movement conversations with good people over the weekend. Most of us are in the movement because someone mentored us or invested in us. Someone, too, invested in them, and so on….